What Did We Learn From This Week in American Collapse?

Four Lessons From the Battle Between Democracy and Authoritarianism

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
6 min readJun 21, 2018

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It can happen here. I’d bet that just days ago, you didn’t really, truly think that “it” could happen here. Maybe you entertained the possibility in the darker corners of your mind, now and then. But mostly, once sanity prevailed, you operated under the assumption that things like…concentration camps for infants…were some kind of gruesome dystopian fantasy. Wrong. Think again. What the last week in American collapse has proven to us beyond a shadow of a doubt is that it can happen here.

But let’s be precise. By “it”, what do we mean? We mean real atrocity. The beginnings, at least, of true crimes against humanity, by the textbook definition. The darkest acts that a society can commit. We mean organized attempts to really genuinely hurt and harm others, in this case helpless little kids, in contravention of international law, domestic law, norms of decency, and civilized values. We mean all the words that we would rather not say. Uniformed men coming for little ones weeping, like monsters in the night.

It can happen here. It did happen here. What does that tell us? We are not above the laws of history. There is nothing remotely different about us from, say Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Maoist China. While it’s true to say that we stopped short of the bottom of the abyss — we came to it in just days, and did so by mere inches, if we know even that much, yet. And we stand right at the precipice still. It won’t take more than a nudge to push us over again.

Faster than you think. The second thing we learned is that it happened here much, much faster than anyone — except people like me, who’ve lived through “it” and studied “it” before, I suppose — expected. In the blink of an eye. Just like that. Snap. One day, we were worried about the usual business of decline — shrinking incomes, rising suicide rates, a general sense of despair. But the next day — bang! — to our horror, little kids, we learned, were being put into camps.

But that wasn’t all. Then we learned that camps were being built for infants. Then we learned that kids were being medically sedated. Then we learned that kids were effectively being harmed, tortured…

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